The news travelled to the Land of Earth not through panicked screams, but in the cold, precise language of seismic sensors and failed check-ins. In his war room, carved deep within a mountain, Onoki, the Third Tsuchikage, stared at the updated tactical map. The markers representing Suna's western command and Kumo's forward supply depots were now crossed with red X's. The intelligence reports were fragmented, unbelievable, yet terrifyingly consistent: a single shinobi, moving with the destructive force of a natural disaster, was systematically dismantling the alliance's war machine.
"He's skipped our forward positions," Onoki murmured, his voice like grinding stones. He floated slightly above his chair, a sign of his agitation. "He's not interested in trading blows with our front-line brutes. He's heading for the arteries." His gnarled fingers traced the supply routes snaking through the canyons and gorges behind Iwa's main forces. "He'll strike the transport lines. That's where he'll be."
A pragmatic, ruthless calculus unfolded in his mind. He would not chase this ghost. He would let the ghost come to him and be ready. He redeployed his forces, not to defend the supply lines directly, but to create a killing box around them.
Elite Earth Style users were hidden within the very rock faces of the most crucial canyons. Sensor-nin were positioned on the high ridges, their networks interlinked. It was a spider's web, and Onoki was the patient spider at its centre, waiting for the fly to buzz into his parlour.
But Hiruzen Sarutobi was no fly. He was a force of erosion.
He did not attack the main camps or the heavily guarded depots. He struck the vulnerable, moving links in the chain. A massive Iwa transport column, protected by two full squads of jonin, was navigating a narrow gorge known as the Serpent's Pass. The lead scout suddenly raised a fist, signalling a halt. The air felt… wrong. Too still.
From the gorge walls high above, Hiruzen's hands moved.
"Earth Release: Earth-Style Core!"
The command was silent, the effect catastrophic. A hundred-meter section of the gorge's floor, directly beneath the central supply wagons, simply disintegrated. It didn't collapse; it turned to fine, flowing dust, creating a sudden, bottomless sinkhole.
The heavy wagons, laden with weapons and food, tipped and vanished into the cloud of dust with a series of echoing, grinding crashes. The Iwa shinobi scrambled, their shouts of alarm swallowed by the groaning earth.
Before they could regroup, the gorge itself seemed to turn against them. "Earth Release: Earth Dragon Projectile!"
But this was no ordinary dragon. Hiruzen, from his perch, moulded not one, but three dragons from the rock face. They did not charge the shinobi; they targeted the remaining cliffs. The massive earthen serpents slammed into the canyon walls with the force of small earthquakes, triggering planned avalanches that rained house-sized boulders down upon the trapped column.
The Iwa jonin, masters of the earth, found their own element betraying them, their defensive walls shattered by impacts of a scale and precision they could scarcely comprehend. The cacophony was immense—a roaring, grinding symphony of destruction that echoed for miles.
Onoki, feeling the seismic tremors through his network, knew his trap had been sprung, but on the wrong prey.
"He's herding us!" he snarled. "He's drawing our responses to the wrong locations!" He ordered his hidden squads to converge on the Serpent's Pass.
But Hiruzen was already gone. He used the chaos as cover. When an Iwa pursuit squad of fifteen jonin, renowned for their "Stone Fist" formation, cornered him on a high ridge, he gave them a lesson in their own art. They surrounded him, the ground at their feet hardening to steel-like density.
"Your earth-walking ends here, Hokage!" their leader barked.
Hiruzen merely stamped his foot.
"Earth Release: Quaking Earth Technique."
The entire ridge trembled, but the Iwa squad held their footing, smirking. It was a feeble technique. Then they felt it. The vibration was not random. It was a frequency, a resonant harmonic that traveled through their own hardened ground and into the very rock they stood on. The stone beneath their feet, which they had made denser, now became brittle. With a sound like a giant pane of glass cracking, the entire section of the ridge sheared off and plummeted into the chasm below, taking the stunned squad with it.
Hiruzen, having calculated the fracture lines, simply stepped back onto solid ground. He had used their own fortified stance to turn the earth into their tomb.
This was the final straw for Onoki. He felt the loss of his elite squad like a physical blow. This was not a matter for subordinates anymore. This was a clash of architects. With a grimace of aged joints and immense pride, the Tsuchikage shot into the sky, a tiny, determined figure against the vastness of the stone mountains.
He found Hiruzen standing calmly on a wide, flat mesa, as if waiting. There were no greetings, no boasts. The two old veterans simply regarded each other, a lifetime of war and leadership passing between them in a single look.
"Your reign of terror ends, Sarutobi," Onoki stated, his hands coming together.
"It ends when the will of my village is secure, Onoki," Hiruzen replied, his own hands rising.
The battle that followed was not one of light and speed, but of intellect and annihilation. Onoki's hands glowed with a terrifying, otherworldly light. "Doton: Iwa no Jutsu is child's play. Behold the pinnacle of Kekkei Tota. Dust Release: Detachment of the Primitive World!"
A shimmering, three-dimensional cube of light shot from his hands, expanding as it flew. It didn't move with incredible speed, but with inexorable purpose.
Anything it touched—air, light, stone—did not burn, shatter, or vaporise. It simply ceased to exist, reduced to subatomic particles. It was the absolute negation of matter.
The cube passed through a spur of the mesa, and a perfect, geometrical section of the mountain simply vanished with a sound like the world sighing into nothingness, leaving behind smooth, glassy edges.
Hiruzen did not try to block it. He couldn't. His mind calculated the vector in a nanosecond. He used a combination of Wind and Earth Release, not against the cube, but against the ground beneath him. He catapulted himself sideways on a platform of rock while simultaneously using a powerful gust to alter his trajectory, the cube missing him by meters. The vacuum it left behind pulled at his robes.
Onoki fired again, a larger cube this time. Hiruzen responded with "Earth Release: Earth-Style Wall," but it was a feint. The moment the cube touched the wall, erasing it from existence, Hiruzen was already underground, using the Hiding Like a Mole Technique.
He didn't stay still.
He moved rapidly, forcing Onoki to hover and guess. The Tsuchikage fired a third cube into the ground where he sensed Hiruzen, vaporising a chunk of the mesa the size of a large building into a perfectly square pit.
Hiruzen erupted from the ground behind Onoki, not with an attack, but with a "Water Release: Water Dragon Jutsu," followed instantly by "Lightning Release: Lightning Beast." The water dragon crackled with energy, aiming to conduct electricity through Onoki's floating form. It was a brilliant, high-level combination.
Onoki, with a grunt of effort, simply vanished from the spot, using his Light-Weight Rock Technique to achieve impossible aerial agility. He reappeared higher up, disdainfully letting the electrified water pass beneath him.
"Predictable!" He formed another Dust Release cube, this one wider, flatter, designed to cut off a larger area of escape.
Hiruzen's eyes narrowed. He couldn't keep dodging forever. He formed a series of shadow clones, all of which scattered. Onoki, annoyed, vaporised two with pinpoint Dust Release blasts, each erasure silent and final. But the real Hiruzen had used the distraction not to attack Onoki, but to plunge his hands into the mesa once more.
"Earth Release: Double Suicide Decapitation Technique!"
But he wasn't pulling Onoki down. He was targeting the foundation of the entire mesa itself. The stone beneath Onoki's floating position groaned, then began to collapse in on itself, not in a random avalanche, but in a controlled implosion designed to trap and bury, not to kill. Onoki was forced to divert his attention, using his power to vaporise the falling debris around him, buying Hiruzen a precious few seconds.
It was all the time he needed. As Onoki blasted his way free of the crumbling rock, he saw Hiruzen standing at the far edge of the devastated mesa. The Hokage's robes were dust-stained, his breathing slightly laboured, but his posture was one of finality, not defeat.
"You fight to preserve your village, Onoki," Hiruzen said, his voice carrying across the newly carved landscape. "So do I. Remember the cost of threatening Konoha's light."
Then, in a puff of smoke that blended with the settling dust of their battle, he was gone. Not a Body Flicker they could track, but a complete disappearance.
Onoki floated amidst the ruins, the geometric pits and vaporised rock a testament to his ultimate power. Yet, he had nothing to show for it. The Hokage had escaped. Below, the reports began to filter in. The Serpent's Pass was irrevocably blocked. Two other key transport routes had been similarly destroyed. Iwa's supply lines, the lifeblood of their massive army, were severed in a dozen places.
He had faced the Hokage in a battle of wits and power, and while neither had landed a decisive blow, there was no doubt who had achieved their strategic objective.
Hiruzen had not come to defeat the Tsuchikage. He had come to cripple Iwa, and he had succeeded. With a bitter curse that was lost to the mountain winds, Onoki began the long, grim process of calculating how to salvage a war effort that had just been gutted by one man.